Abstract
This fascinating book calls upon public administration to reorganize and reconstruct its governance and institutional principles on a positive doctrine of public governance based on the classical-liberal ethos. Drawing upon insights from Austria, Virginia, and Bloomington Schools of Political Economy, Aligica, Boettke, and Tarko attempt to bridge the classical-liberal view of political economy, new institutionalism, and public choice with public administration.
The book is an endeavor to answer some of the most crucial metaquestions facing the audience in the field of public administration, such as what is the viable role of government in a democratic society? What is the suitable range of government activities and legitimate tools, instruments, and procedures for governing collective affairs?
The authors explore the answers to these questions by identifying and exploring the classical-liberal conceptual framework, tools, features, and procedures of the administration of collective affairs. This framework is grounded in “individualism, freedom of choice, freedom of association” (p.25). The authors build and develop their argument by addressing the issue of collective coordination in the public sector through a polycentric understanding of multiple nodes of competing powers.
The book is divided into 3 sections and 11 chapters. In section one, “A Distinctive Perspective on Governance,” Aligica, Boettke, and Tarko emphasize the ever-changing logic of the private and public relationships based on Normative Individualism and Public Choice. Building on the work of scholars and philosophers such as F.A. Hayek, James Buchanan, and Vincent and Elinor Ostrom, they explore the public administration field from the angle of “freedom of choice, voluntary association, knowledge, and learning, adaptability and resilience” to find a solution for the knowledge and power problems related to bureaucratic public administration based on “authority, hierarchy, and control” (p.80).
The classical-liberal governance approach invites us to govern with citizens; “see like a citizen” rather than rule over citizens; “see like a state” (p.24). Without prioritizing individuals and their choices, there is no democratic view of public administration. As a result, they offer the notion of “Dynamic Governance” as “an adaptive institutional system” that can capture the ever-changing nature of the collective affairs based on “private-public mixed arrangements, quasi-markets, quasi-governments, and nonprofit and civil society organizations” rather than “pure market or a pure government” (p.122).
Public governance can often be carried out through civic/civil society organizations or the third sector. These institutions can limit social conflicts and satisfy the preferences of people who are directly impacted by programs and policies. Based on this view, local knowledge embedded in the complexities of our everyday life plays a critical role. They argue that in contrast to top-down direct government control, co-production with citizens and bottom-up governance is essential for “solving the knowledge problem” (p.130) by empowering people to access local, and often tacit, knowledge of time and place.
Section two, “Public Choice and Public Administration,” begins with a chapter mapping the foundations of public choice as the leading carrier of the classical-liberal ethos, and merging it with public administration literature and its evolution. In the next two chapters, Aligica, Boettke, and Tarko provide context and relevance on how the classical-liberal theory of governance based on “individuals (as normative and analytical units), voluntary association, and self-governance” (p. 153). This is accomplished by discussing Vincent and Elinor Ostrom's scholarship on new Institutionalism and a democratic understanding of public administration as a self-governing arrangement that supports self-governance, competition, pluralism, and polycentricity.
Self-governance is structured in response to the classical-liberal understanding of public governance by taking the knowledge and power problems seriously. It offers innovative tools for resource provision in some policy areas regarding collective action dilemmas. A prosperous self-governing arrangement provides its members with the most significant possible opportunity to set rules and live under them while at the same time upholding a broad sense of community. But for that to happen, individuals have to play a critical role in creating those rules (co-production of rules).
In this case, public governance is more about social processes driven by individual incentives and the governance of spontaneous orders rather than ideal types and end states. It is about the decisions, institutions, and procedures between the private and the public interface. Each chapter builds wonderfully upon the previous one to reconsider polycentricity and co-production as tools for answering collective social problems. A key conclusion emerging from this discussion is that a prosperous self-governing society needs to be polycentric.
Employing the Ostroms’ work as a primary basis in section three, “Framing the Applied Level,” the authors provide themes, issue areas, and case studies on real-world governance beyond the United States context. Taking steps in the applied direction, they exemplify implications of the concepts, principles, and theories that outline classical-liberal governance through the cases explored in Chapters 7–9. These cases are grounded through the ideas of polycentricity, knowledge processes, contesting powers, and freedom of association in conditions of complexity and uncertainty.
In the first study, focused on metropolitan governance, the authors use the example of community policing to show that polycentric arrangements are more viable than centralized ones for their communities. Next chapter, in the case of independent regulatory agencies, Aligica, Boettke, and Tarko use comparative institutional analysis and public choice as frameworks to better study and understand the operations of independent regulatory agencies through the perspective of classical-liberal governance theory. In the last chapter of part three, focused on the case of corporate social responsibility, the authors use the public choice institutionalist polycentric-based perspective to address the complex issue of corporations’ public role.
In the final chapter, Aligica, Boettke, and Tarko again emphasize their simple, yet powerful, claim that public governance can be better carried out through self-governance arrangements, including individual diversity, institutional complexity, and civil society. They also note that some of the principles, theoretical framework, themes, and tools of classical-liberal governance theory have already gained attention and implication during the past decades in the field of public administration and public management. The authors particularly point to the meta-governance paradigm and briefly describe the similarities and alignments between the classical-liberal view of governance and Meta-governance.
However, this is just the kind of approach that is missed in previous chapters of the book, primarily in section two, where the audience (mainly in the field of public administration and public management) would expect to see a discussion of the relation and distinctions between the classical-liberal governance themes and the themes under prevailing paradigms such as New Public Management, New Public Governance, Network governance, Meta governance as they relate to both theory and application. As one of the pioneering attempts to provide a classical-liberal view of governance that also attempts to call on the public administration audience, the authors face the burden of situating their preferred model in relation to what is going on in the vast and robust public administration and public management literature and its evolution mainly during the past two decades.
That being said, it is essential to acknowledge and appreciate the value, insights, and scholarship of the book concerning the full explanation of the core logic connecting public choice and public administration under the classical-liberal view of governance and the invaluable contributions in bridging the classical-liberal view of political economy, new institutionalism, and public choice with public administration and public management.
Overall, Aligica, Boettke, and Tarko do a great job addressing the field of public administration directly from a Classical-liberal view. As a result, this book is a timely piece of scholarship and very much beneficial for academics, policymakers, and practitioners in the various areas of public affairs and public administration and public management—e.g., urban planning, criminal justice, public finance, public health, and education—to acquire a better understanding of the logic and philosophy behind the tools, policy instruments, strategies they employ to address complex problems. As such, the book also has educational implications for various scales and scopes in public administration and its subfields as it engages with fundamental questions in public governance and collective affairs and provides an innovative theoretical framework centered on the classical-liberalism philosophy for understanding and addressing them.
